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LETTERS: GOP has offered health care reforms

FROM OUR READERS

To the editor:

Patricia Ducharme’s letter alleges Rep. Joe Heck and his fellow self-serving Republicans are still griping about the Affordable Care Act and have failed to come up with their own plan (“Heck, GOP should support Obamacare,” April 3 Review-Journal). These views can’t be further from the truth.

Rep. Heck, who is also a physician, recognizes the devastating flaws of the ACA — a law that amounts to a huge tax increase on the American people in a struggling economy, and worse, government control of one-sixth of the American economy. Not only fellow Republicans, but many Democrats and independents think the law should be repealed. And rather than not offering anything to replace this flawed legislation, Rep. Heck and other legislators have introduced many reforms in the House of Representatives, only to be ignored by the Senate, whose Democrat majority fights every attempt to block the very reforms that would reduce health care costs and free up funding that could be used to provide health care to those unable to provide it for themselves.

Injudicious legislators have been acting in their own self-interest by fighting these reforms for decades, rather than working for the good of the American people. Rep. Heck and many of his constituents have long advocated moving insurance coverage toward an individual-based model, incentivizing the purchase of insurance through tax credits, and most importantly tort reform and increasing competition by allowing the purchase of insurance across state lines. But legislators indebted to the trial lawyers’ cabal and its long-standing history of campaign contributions to the Democratic Party continue to insulate Americans from real reform.

Moreover, the liberal philosophy that government is the answer to all ills is a position that has been discredited over and over again. Many of us understand that the way ahead is through strengthening Medicare, repealing onerous red tape on businesses that prevents them from growing and hiring, eliminating taxes levied on individuals for taking care of their own health care decisions and replacing broken pieces of the law with reasonable reforms.

It’s our responsibility, therefore, not to point fingers and continue to feed the insatiable partisanship monster that prevents our county from moving ahead, but to demand all our federal legislators establish, in law, meaningful health care system reforms. The kinks in the current law will never get worked out on their own.

JACOB KESSEL

HENDERSON

Partisan letters

To the editor:

An increasing number of letters printed in both local newspapers can be summarized as follows: “Republicans are poop heads. I don’t like them. They hate women, children, poor people, seniors and minorities. And they don’t hand out enough taxpayer-funded goodies.”

Now I’m no expert at editing a newspaper, but can’t the quality of printed letters be improved just a tad? There must be some liberals out there who can write a coherent, rational, factual letter. Please find them.

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